


death as a fetish

by orphan_account



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Character Death, Child Abuse, Gen, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Self-Hatred, Spoilers, Suicidal Ideation, fun list of tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:20:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21719806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: CF route. The Gautier Crest becomes more than Sylvain can bear.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 101





	death as a fetish

**Author's Note:**

> There's a fairly gory section at the very end, so if that doesn't float your boat keep an eye out. And also another warning for ideation of self-harm. There wasn't a tag for that. 
> 
> Someone on twitter tweeted this idea and I said 'Oh?'. Coupled with the Gautier/Death parallel and something like this happens.
> 
> Edit: Made some changes because when I reread this my mind went 'very cringey!'

The first time it happens Sylvain is six years old and so very unaware of the nature of his blood. 

It’s quick and anticlimactic, all things considered. He wanders out of sight of one of his nursemaids and his clumsy feet trip over the edge of the large carpet in the parlour, causing him to fall and hit his head on the corner of the solid wood table with a grisly  _ crack. _

He wakes to the sound of his nursemaid wailing and something warm and sticky coating the side of his face. His head throbs as he sits up unsteadily, no idea what the big fuss is about until his hand comes up in front of his face and the sight of blood makes him start sobbing something fierce. His nursemaid looks at him like she’s witnessing a miracle and grabs him to check the back of his head, bewildered when the only thing she finds beneath her fingers is wild red hair and unbroken skin. Sylvain sobs and sobs into her chest all the while like six year olds do, too distraught to notice her confusion.

The next few days are full of bedrest and visits from healers, all of whom are completely baffled by his total lack of any physical trauma. The nursemaid chalks it up to be a miracle from the Goddess and that’s that, and his father is conspicuously silent throughout the whole affair. He's too young to really care about any of it, mostly just frustrated that he’s not allowed out to play, and the incident is quickly forgotten.

\---

The second time it happens, he’s twelve and stuck in the bottom of a well. The water is frigid in the way that it only is in the far north, his frantic kicking stirring it up and buffeting him against the slimy sides of the well. It’s hard to keep his grip, his right arm is dangling uselessly at his side, screaming whenever it so much as shifts and he’s never really gotten around to training with his left, and the blood pouring from his torn fingers is only making everything worse. He’s been screaming for what feels like hours, to the point where blood bubbles up between his lips and chokes him. 

Slowly, slowly, his cries peter out into desperate sobs punctuated with wet, ragged coughs, and as the moon gilds the bottomless black of the well, he finally loses his grip and sinks, fingers bleeding like spilt wine in the water. The inky liquid clogs his mouth and throat, dragging him down, down, down, and then he sees nothing at all

  
  
  
  
  


He turns on his side and retches violently, murky water spewing out of his mouth and on to… something. He struggles and finds it hard to move like he’s tangled in a web, so he flails his arms and legs to try and free himself. His wild movements eventually rip away the white sheet that’s been covering him, and he takes in his surroundings. 

It’s his room, with its familiar high ceilings and heavy velvet curtains drawn tight, the hearth across from his bed stone cold even though it’s chilly enough to warrant a fire in every room of the keep. The familiarity of his surroundings does nothing to prevent panic from tearing it’s frigid claws into his skin as he clutches his head in his shaking hands. Miklan tried to kill him. His brother threw him into the well with his own hands, confident that it would do the job. Had it? Had he died? Was that why everything was so eerily silent? He’s suffocating under the weight of the air. 

His panic makes him sloppy, and he stumbles out of bed in his haste to get out of his room. He had to find someone, anyone, to confirm that he wasn’t stuck in some sort of empty purgatory. His legs buckle as he tries to stand, shaky as they are, and he falls to his knees to try to control his breathing. His right arm aches as he puts his weight on it and- didn’t he break that one? The healers must have gotten to it, because it wasn’t in any sort of sling. But where were they? 

He gets to his legs again, and is satisfied when they hold his weight just fine. The hallway’s completely dark, the sconces lining the walls dark and bare, the heavy carpet muffling his steps as he presses on, one hand on the wall to steady himself should his legs fail again. The dark silence clings to his eyes and makes the place fuzzy and surreal, everything disappearing if he looks too hard at it. He truly must be in purgatory, because the keep has never felt this eerie. 

He flinches as the sound of rustling cuts through the mire, and then quickens his pace to the source. He’s nearing his father’s study, if his sense of direction was correct, so maybe he’ll find answers to whatever the hell is happening there. He rounds the corner and is pushed off his feet as he runs face-first into one of the maids. He groans as he gets back on his feet and stops cold at the sight of the maids pale face, her eyes wide as the moon and mouth open in a silent scream. Was there something on his face? It was like she saw a ghost.

His questioning of the maid only leads her to point soundlessly at the door of his father’s study, her hand shaking like a branch in a storm. The light of a fire cuts a window into the dark hallway as he pushes the heavy doors open with great effort, stopping the scene within on its tracks. His father, an imposing beast of a man, hunches over his desk with his hands tearing into his hair. Miklan sits opposite him, carelessly slouching in one of the armchairs his father keeps for meetings. They both look at him in the same beat like they were synchronized, shock flickering over both their faces not in the ‘ _ Oh, what are you doing awake at this hour?’  _ way but in the  _ ‘What the hell am I seeing’  _ way that the maid had plastered over her face, although in retrospect, his fathers was more shock-then-relief-then-knowing and Miklan, well he looks like Sylvain had just crawled out of the grave. 

And Sylvain, seeing Miklan, has to stop his legs from stumbling out the door and the hell away from him, because he just pitched him down a well like it was nothing and every encounter with him has a good 50 percent chance that he’s going to get the shit beat out of him, but this is also the only room in the keep where he can get answers as to what was going on, so he stays firmly rooted to the ground. 

Later, his father takes him aside for a private conversation which means Miklan is definitely coming for his ass some time soon, and talks to him about what this all means. It’s more Crest bullshit, blah-blah-blah, a blessing and a curse for those who guard the border. It’s just a curse, Sylvain thinks, because it makes his brother hate him, and makes men and women look at him like he’s a fucking buffet, and it makes his father pretend to mourn his wife after she dies in labour one minute and forget about her the next the moment it was revealed the child she bore had a Crest. So Sylvain tunes the whole speech out like always because it can’t be anything new. 

\---

The pillow shoved over his face is just like the sheet covering him after he was dragged out of the well, and even though he’s already drowned once suffocating on land is somehow worse. He’s been clawing and grasping blindly to try and throw Miklan off for ages but he’s built like a fortress knight and Sylvain is only growing weaker by the minute, the weight of the pillow awfully like the hand the duchess used to keep him from crying out when she finally came in for the kill last week. He struggles harder and he thinks his hand finds purchase against rough skin, but that only makes Miklan push the pillow down harder, and harder, and everything goes dark. 

And he’s awake again, morning light piercing through the crack in the curtains he always keeps closed tight, hand scratching desperately at his neck to confirm that yes, he is breathing, yes, he is alive. The pillow used to choke him to death is lying next to him, plumped up just how he likes it and it’s just such a funny moment of irony that he goes to laugh but chokes instead. 

He’ll be coughing up down feathers for weeks, for sure.

And it’s like a repeat of the last time he died when he goes down to the dining hall except his father isn’t there because he never is, he gets up to train at 4, bathes at 7, and works in his study for the rest of the day, but Miklan is there and he chokes too, the blood draining out of his face as Sylvain stands there with that awful sort of serenity he’s learned to cultivate whenever this sort of thing happens, and really, in the end, he doesn’t have any right to be angry about this anyways. He still has the longest straw. 

He has a hard time sleeping for months after that, staying up whispering prayers that he only half believes even though he’s a Gautier and his territory is one of the most superstitious ones on the continent, flinching at any slight noise that sounds from out his door. He loves his half-idea of the Goddess, because he thinks that the hands of Sothis are the only ones that can truly peel away the mask he’s been wearing so often he’s not entirely sure who he actually is, but he hates half of Her too, because he prays so often and gets nothing in return. He wonders if this is what it’s like to truly love someone. 

But maybe he doesn’t deserve to have his prayers heard, let alone answered, and in that case he doesn’t hate Her at all. 

Miklan only comes back once in all those months of nigh constant vigilance, and this time Sylvain is ready with one eye open and a dagger under his pillow, so when his brother reaches towards his neck he jumps up and slashes the knife across his face, making Miklan howl like a wounded red wolf. Sylvain dashes off and hides in the servants quarters for the rest of the night because they know what’s happening to him well enough to let him stay there, but aren’t allowed to do anything else about it, and only pokes his nose out in the late afternoon. The next time he gets caught by his brother Miklan bashes his head against the wall so hard he can’t walk straight for a week, but he’s too busy reveling in the sight of the healing wound across his ugly mug that he’s not that upset about it. 

\---

Miklan is officially given the boot the night he’s caught exiting the armoury, Lance of Ruin in hand and dead guards behind him. He knows and everyone else knows that he hasn’t been part of the family for at least seventeen years, but his father only makes it a big thing when he has a legitimate reason to kick him out. Sylvain is angry, angry at his father for finalizing Miklan’s fate, angry that it was Miklan trying to steal the relic that made his father finally take action instead of the decade of constant pain that Sylvain lived through. He’s relieved at the same time, and the guilt of relief marks his face like a criminal. It’s awful to have have the weight of righteous anger and shame on his shoulders at the same time, but when he realizes that he’ll never have a reason to sleep with one eye open again it becomes almost bearable. 

  
  


His father is threatening to send him off to Garreg Mach that year and it’s an awful reminder of the rest of his life that’s threatening to break his back, so he fails the entrance exam two years in a row because it’s easy enough to do when he knows the right answer to every question, pouting and shrugging when his father slams the rejection letter in front of him, wondering when his gifted and proper son turned into an idiotic whore who couldn’t even bother to button his shirt the right way. He finally gets in the year he turns twenty, along with Dimitri, Ingrid, and Felix, because going along with them is as good an incentive as any. His father is becoming miserable to be around all the same. 

And it’s fine. He’s with his friends, even though they can’t really be considered that anymore, and there’s enough girls there that he knows he’ll be busy with them for a while. Class is a bore, he skips out on training, he goes to chapel with half a mind. It’s normal. The only exciting thing is the professor the archbishop supposedly fished out of the gutter on a whim, but they’re teaching the Adrestian kids so his interaction with them is minimal at best. 

The missions are the only thing he truly looks forward to, even though the Black Eagles always get the best pick of the crop, going off to kill bandits, doing something or other in the Holy Tomb, meanwhile with his class it’s always escort missions, guard this, watch that, and more escort missions. He’s pretty glad they didn’t have to go and kill Ashe’s dad though. Poor kid didn’t come to class for days and just sat in a pew with his head in his hands. Sprung right up afterwards, somehow. Couldn’t be him. 

The missions are great because it’s a chance to fuck around outside the school, and when they do get into danger he’s the first to throw himself in the fray. He bites off more than he can chew more often than not, and takes hits even the least experienced fighter could have dodged. Felix screams at him for that, and even though he mostly tunes it out he finds it nice to know he cares enough about him that he doesn’t want him to die. One of them has to. 

When he was thirteen he sat against his mother’s grave outside the chapel in the only time he could really be himself, and confessed to the stone and the blessedly cool dirt that he never wants to grow up. His father had stretched out his future like an animal skin and all he saw was the barbs that would bind him for decades after. He doesn’t get to live, not really. 

And even the facsimile of living was hard. Years of agony weighed him down, phantom eyes and lips and hands had taken his body until there was nothing left for him to own. His brother’s scorn had marked his body in bloody lacerations and bruises and broken bones, his father’s need for him to be  _ stronger, better _ cutting even deeper. His blood burned in his veins, and burned him for years and years until the one thing he truly wanted was to let it all pour out, but he can’t. His Crest lets him die, but not in the way he wants, and he has to wonder why such an awful contradiction was born alongside him. 

And so he chooses to die, and die, and die because the only luxury he was afforded upon his birth was to pretend to live and then pretend to die. 

It’s not really a surprise when this leads to the others finding out about his… condition sooner than he would like, which is never, but when an axe buries itself several inches in his gut and he’s up and prancing around an hour later like nothing happened it’s bound to draw some suspicion. Manuela drinks herself into a stupor earlier than usual, and when Mercedes gently prods at the topic he acts like he always does whenever someone tries to get him to tell them something true about himself and snaps before running away. He feels a little bad about it later though, because he thinks he almost might genuinely like Mercedes. 

So all in all, it’s just regular school life. 

And then the Black Eagles are assigned to go kill his brother, because the stupid sonuvabitch actually got his hands on the Lance this time. He’s relieved that it’s the other class, and furious at the same time. He doesn’t truly want to kill him, because even after a decade and a half of getting beaten to a pulp by the man he still can’t come up with a reason for why it wasn’t justified, but if anyone has to do it, shouldn’t it be him? He can’t really come up with a good reason for it, other than it’s poetic. The professor must sense this, because the last free day before the mission they shuffle over to him in the knight’s hall and ask blandly if he wants to join the class on the next mission. He loves theatre, and every good tragedy needs an ironic twist, so he says yes, because what is his life but a tragic display for everyone else to gawk at and say  _ what a shame, what a shame.  _

His brother is such a bastard.

So he heads off with the rest of the Black Eagles, an eccentric group with a propensity for loud spontaneous arguments that isn’t too different than his own class. Conand tower is a bitch to climb, but they’re a competent enough group that they manage not to die until they reach the top. Helps that there’s a Kingdom knight tagging along like a souvenir from home. 

And when he’s facing Miklan head on it’s like every time he would look at him like he was looking at a heap of dog shit before grabbing his arm so hard it bruised and beating him until he bled, except he knows that this time their positions will be reversed and Miklan will be the one dying. The professor calls out orders but he isn’t listening, and the rain slides down the back of his neck as he finally drives his lance through his brother’s chest. 

That’s when things go horribly, horribly wrong. 

He always knew that his brother was a monster (it takes one to know one) and as the black tendrils creep out of the Lance and reveal an exterior to match the interior it’s so funny Sylvain almost wants to laugh. His Crest truly is a poison, infecting him and everyone and everything he comes in contact with, and he would cut himself open and let himself bleed it all out if he wasn’t worried that it would infect the earth too. This happening, it’s really concrete proof that he is cursed by his blood, so no one like Ingrid or whoever can look at him sadly and say ‘Ah well, you only  _ think _ that’. It’s a grotesque sight, all shifting black muscle and blood and other awful things, and he feels like it suits them both. 

Fighting a Demonic Beast is like swinging his lance at a stone wall over and over and over with nothing to show for it and even though having the others taking potshots alongside him helps, things take a turn for the worse because of course it does. The Beast - Miklan - whatever zeroes in on him as he hangs back for a breather and charges forward, narrowly missing crushing the Brigid girl under his feet. He readies himself to dodge but he’s too slow, always too slow, he could never outrun his brother, and  _ howls _ as the long jagged teeth of the Beast pierces through his armour and into his torso.  _ This time,  _ he thinks,  _ this’ll really kill me _ , and Miklan flings him around for a few excruciating seconds while the other students watch in absolute horror, and the fangs tearing out of him is as painful as when they entered but it doesn’t last for long because Miklan throws him against the wall like a ragdoll and his neck  _ snaps _ and then he feels nothing at all. 

  
  
  


He comes to with the feeling of someone’s hand at his neck and he slaps it away without thinking because every time there’s been a hand on his throat he’s come away with a necklace of bruises and a cough that takes ages to go away. His eyes flutter open and he’s face to face with the Black Eagles sole healer, the sleepy kid with the weirdass haircut, and right now his face is so white it rivals the damn moon. He stammers incredulously, but Sylvain isn’t listening because past him, and past the gaggle of horrified students is the grotesquely mangled body of his brother collapsed on the cold stone floor. 

He stands, and to everyone else it’s a miracle, but for him it’s just another day. 

The students are losing their shit, their whispers of ‘ _ He was dead, he was totally dead, so why is he standing?’, ‘Can Linhardt do necromancy?’,  _ and  _ ‘Holy shit, what the hell is going on?’  _ filtering through the air, but the rain is coming down so hard it’s like a curtain separating him from the others and he can’t hear a thing at the foot of his brothers body. 

He’s sad, and furious, and relieved, and apathetic all at once and it’s an awful cocktail of emotions to choke down. He should do something, shed a few tears, say a prayer, swipe a hand over his brother’s eyes to close them for the last time, but he just stands there and looks on. The Lance of Ruin seems more perverted than ever, resting a scant few inches from Miklan’s mangled grasp. Clearly no one wanted to go near the thing, and the original plan was to have him take it, but then he died and then they were shit out of luck. 

But he’s alive now, so he bends down and takes the Lance in his hands, and turns around to the others who are watching him with a mixture of shock and awe and says ‘Let’s go’ before leaving his brothers body alone in the rain. 

\---

He tries his damndest to return everything to normal. Tries his best to ignore the pitying looks from the other Blue Lions, shoves Dimitri off when he lays a hand on his shoulder and asks if there’s anything he can do, and copes with the awful tangle of emotions left behind from the mission by letting himself get used by whoever so much as looks at him. It’s what he always does, so it’s normal, perfectly fucking normal. Except it isn’t. 

He’s used to rumours, used to whispers swirling around about his habits, but that morning when he walks into the dining hall and everyone including the kitchen staff whips around to stare at him he just knows that the dam has burst. The gazes of so many people have him pinned down like a bug and all he wants to do is run the hell away, so he puts on a dazzling smile and mock-salutes, and everyone graciously goes back to their meals. 

And this goes on for the rest of the day, people giving him looks and running up to talk to him to ‘see if it’s true’, and he really, really does not want to talk to anyone about it but he has a facade to keep up so he dances around all their questions and keeps the matter out of reach like he’s an antagonistic older sibling. He manages to get a couple of dates out of the whole debacle, which is fine by him, but it doesn’t do anything to stop the anger that courses through his veins because he knows that it’s all because of his fucking Crest. It always is, always always always, because he’s completely worthless without it. It drives him up the fucking wall with how much he’s hounded by the others because of the damn thing.

He remembers when he was about four or five, and he had to sit for a Gautier family portrait except it was only him and his father because his mother had died minutes after he was born and Miklan, who was twelve, wasn’t a  _ true _ Gautier, and he was fuming for weeks. The portrait hangs in the library along with all the other portraits of the Gautier bloodline. His father, imposing as an iron tower, his massive fur cloak making him look broader than he already was, and comically tiny Sylvain on his knee, with his big amber eyes and faint smattering of freckles across his face, his wispy red hair matching at least one person in every portrait down the line. The week before Miklan raided the armoury and slaughtered the guards within, he caught him standing in front of the portrait, his eyes tracing every brushstroke with enough burning hatred to rival the sun. The portrait was an eternal landmark of his disinheritance, a representation of all the privileges a Crest granted, and he was as much in the portrait as he was out of it, because little Sylvain’s eyes were trained off to the left where he had been standing when the portrait was done. 

So they just don’t  _ get it _ . They don’t get it at all, they think his Crest is some great trophy or medal awarded to a prized stallion. They’ll never see the portrait, never be in the library at that moment and see the sheer amount of fury in his brother’s eyes. He could cut up his torso with a blade and spill out all his rotten guts and shattered bones and they would coo over it like he’s some sort of toy because his blood is coating every inch of the ground. 

\---

The war slams into Garreg Mach with full force and smashes everything in its wake. The survivors scatter to their home countries, and Sylvain bursts into the war room of Castle Gautier after half a week of travel to find his father hunched over maps and letters from the other lords of Faerghus, already planning their next move. Half of Gautier’s forces are sent to Fhirdiad to bolster the royal army, and another third is sent North to Sreng, because another invasion is likely to happen with all of the inner turmoil. Sylvain is sent, along with the Lance of Ruin, when it finally does and he spends weeks fighting on slippery sand in the alternating burning and freezing temperatures of the Northern wasteland. 

When he does return, weary and wanting nothing more than a hot bath, his father sends him South to help fend off the Empire’s advance. And this is how it goes for years, to the North to fend off Sreng, to the South to fend off the Empire, with occasional calls back to Fhirdiad and Gautier to strategize. Every inch of land is hard fought for, and progress on either side of the conflict is rare to make. Five years of maddening back and forth, and then news arrives at the Fhirdiad war room that makes the courts’ heads spin; that the Imperial army is heading at a breakneck pace to Myrddin, and the professor, the teal-haired enigma with the legendary Sword of the Creator at their belt, has been sighted at the front of the charge. 

Then things move all too fast. The Alliance is captured within months, and with the lords’ military at their backs the Empire turns it’s red gaze back to Faerghus. As the Empire’s forces switch paths to Arianrohd Sylvain begs Dimitri to send him in defense of the fort because he knows that if anyone else were to go the fort would be nothing but a graveyard, but Dimitri looks right through him in that awful distant way and staunchly refuses, because he either doesn’t know of Sylvain’s condition or doesn’t care, so the next day Sylvain goes to say his goodbyes to Felix and Ingrid. He’s a good actor, so he says he’s certain they’ll be back before too long, cracks a few jokes and gets shoved off, but he knows more than anything else that they’ve already lost. 

And then it’s him, Dimtri, and Dedue on the bloody plains, the rain soaking into the cracks of his armour and the cold is familiar in a way that makes him shake, but he keeps a solid grip on the Lance as he charges forward, Gautier forces flanking him. Maybe today will be the day that he will finally die, in this picture of hell at the end of the world, the plains that were once brown and green becoming red, red, red. Dimitri stands proud at the crest of the hill, Areadbhar a beacon of light for those below, and Dedue holds steadfast at the bottom, unrelenting. 

Sylvain sees the Empire’s forces, sees the professor and Edelgard leading the charge, and sees the ones who killed Ingrid and Felix and will take everything else until there is nothing left. Maybe he would have joined them, because the promise of a world where Crests mean nothing fills him with something almost like hope, but no, he can see Felix’s cold fury and Ingrid’s righteous stance and knows at the end of the world all he can do is avenge them or follow in their footsteps. He fights like a beast, the Lance tearing through foes like paper and spraying even more blood on the crimson landscape as the screams of the people caught in his spells fill his ears. 

He fights to the front of the Imperial army, the Lance urging to taste royal blood, his horses hooves pounding furiously into the ground when an arrow catches his shoulder, but he just snarls and presses onward, the Lance’s furious blade aiming towards Linhardt when his horse goes down from another arrow, sending him into the bloody mud. He feels Dimitri’s gaze from atop the hill as he growls like a monster and charges through the sundry, sending spells behind him without looking and feeling the angry flames burn his back. An unearthly cry tears from his lips as he barrels to the forefront of the army, to get to the professor, to Edelgard, he has to, has to, has to, and Ferdinand makes the mistake of getting in his way so he raises the Lance of Ruin to rend him from shoulder to crotch and-

It breaks in his grasp, the shards raining down around him like fire, and he looks up, eyes wide as Ferdinand plunges his holy spear down, and as it tears through his collarbone and into his heart he thinks,  _ ah, so this is it then, this is how… I’ll… die… _

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The world is on fire, so he must be in hell. 

Hell is welcome to him, because he was always so certain that the Goddess would never welcome someone like him into Her arms, certainly after cheating death so many times. He welcomes Hell, because he knows he is truly dead, and the mere thought feels almost like Heaven. He wonders if his brother is with him as well. Surely he is. Will he still hate him? Will their one-sided feud continue even beyond the grave? Perhaps that is his eternal punishment, and if so, he does not mind. He will miss his friends though. Felix, Ingrid, they’re surely in the great feasting halls with their ancestors and their ancestors ancestors, because they died proud and strong, like heroes. They will see Glenn, and perhaps Felix can reconcile with his father, because the grace of the Goddess in Heaven washes away all superficial human things. The eternal flames gets no such luxury.

Light pierces through his eyelids and Sylvain opens them to greet Hell. 

The sky is blue, and the ground is red. His arm stretches out before him, bent wrong in so many places and lodged firmly in the ground. He forces his eyes to move up, past his black gauntlets to the tips of his fingers, where the thoroughly broken Lance of Ruin lies just out of reach, twitching pathetically. 

_ No _

Because he can only look, he frantically moves his sight past the relic, further, further, where the bodies of so many lay, eviscerated on the red, red ground. Fires smoulder, and javelins, lances, swords stick into the mud like a pin cushion, viscera, limbs, and charred flesh strewn around like a demented painting. 

He is not in Hell, but his surroundings are still a perfect picture of it. 

Every breath is excruciating, as if there are a hundred thousand spears lodged in his insides, and the horror of being alive makes him gasp harder, and hurt worse, as tears of agony and anguish stream from his eyes and down his mangled face, and it hurts even to cry like that, so he cries more until he is gasping like he was drowning and with every gasp he lets out a faint whine of pain, because it is all he can do. He was wrong, he was wrong about it all, because everyone has died and escaped this, while he, whom the Goddess must hate hate  _ hate,  _ is stuck in his death throes forever, in the picture of Hell of his own doing, crying because he can’t even breathe without it being torture. 

But eventually his tears run dry, and he can do nothing but lay in the mud.

Maybe,  _ maybe,  _ Dimitri survived. It’s a feeble hope about as thin and fragile as a strand of hair, but he clings to it desperately, letting it pull him up, and the bones in his hand  _ snap _ into place when he clenches it. 

He sits up, and his vertebrae pop into place one by one, his ribs scraping out of his lungs as his collarbone shifts into place. Breathing easier, his other arm resets and his legs which were so mangled and torn straighten out. Standing, the last thing he does is grab his hair and give it a yank, his neck snapping into position. Physically, he is whole so easily. If only he could tear out his heart and fix everything else. 

He staggers slowly towards the great hill where Dimitri had been standing so proudly, because he will either find his body there or nothing at all. Great claw marks had gouged trenches into the soft earth, filled with pools of blood. He passes an Imperial soldier missing a third of their torso, and a Kingdom cavalier with no head, and he envies the both of them because they were allowed to die. He stops at the foot of one body, so awfully mangled in death that he is only recognizable by the colour of his skin. Dedue is dead, and therefore- 

At the top of the hill lies the body of the King, a great gash extending diagonally from shoulder to hip. His pale hair washed red, empty eyes wide and staring at the cloudless sky. 

And if Dimitri had fallen, then Fhirdiad must be in flames as well. The last remaining knight of the Kingdom looks out across the great expanse of the burning plains filled with disfigured corpses and blood and guts and bones and knows that he has only one thing to do. 

His path takes him to where his body laid in the trench of a monstrous footprint and he finds the shattered remains of his relic. The head squirms feebly in his grip as he continues on south, past pikes, and horses, and bodies, and fires and eventually he breaks on through the plains, and continues his trek to Enbarr, to the Imperial army, to the Emperor, to where he will finally die. 

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I feel like the German neoclassical band Nachtreich should get an additional credit for this because they were all I listened to while writing this. Gone but not forgotten.
> 
> Follow me on twitter @mumagi for extensive bitching about French baking and also Sylvain


End file.
